We're under attack, but we are doing all we can to put up some walls. Still, I'm taking bets on how long it'll be before some spammer adds a comment to this post...

Pundit friends,

You will have notice that recently we've become the the focus of a deluge of spam. We are working on this, and I'm really sorry to you all that you're having to suffer this. Sorry again.

Still, could be worse... At least you haven't spent half the evening deleting hundreds of fake member accounts from the past two months, as I have!

If, in this purge, I have accidentally deleted your membership, my apologies. Please sign up again. Best to use your real name, create a profile and make a comment pronto, so there's evidence you're a real person wanting to play by the rules.

I wanted to let you know we've introduced captcha now, so that new members have to tell the computer what those wobbly letters look like. That's meant to stop the robots and evil auto-spammers out there. I'm not sure it's working, but we're trying.

To the spammers, I detest you. You achieve nothing but loathing. To the idiots who call themselves 'Im a Spammer' and 'Robert Mugabe', thanks for making it a little easier. To all the rest, the I'd dig a tenth level of hell, just for you.

One last point – if any of you Punditeers ever buys Ugg boots, US sports jerseys or Moncler consider yourself barred. They are now Pundit enemy numbers one, two and three.

Alan, you don't know the half of it. The more I look, the more I find to clean. There are literally thousands of fakes who have got into our system. But we're deleting new ones every day and trying to clean up the backlog when we have time!

One depressing thing is that they're still getting through captcha. Which means there must be actual humans sitting there wasting their time, forcing these comments onto a small site in a tiny country where no-one gives a monkey's about NHL jerseys!